Jean Fritz, Who Wrote History Books for Children, Dies at 101

Jean Fritz, an award-winning writer whose work helped transform historical biographies for children from leaden recitals of battles and dates into warm, human narratives full of quirks and crotchets and satisfyingly strange facts, died on Sunday at her home in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. She was 101.

Her son, David Fritz, confirmed the death.

The author of more than four dozen books, Mrs. Fritz was known in particular for her biographies of many of the signal figures of 18th- and 19th-century American history.

Hallmarks of her work, critics agreed, included her fleet, engaging prose and prodigious archival research. (Mrs. Fritz would put no dialogue into her subjects’ mouths unless it was attested in original sources like letters and diaries.)

What was more, where children’s biographies of an earlier age inclined toward unalloyed veneration, Mrs. Fritz’s were warts-and-all portraits of the often flawed men and women who left their impress on the world — and the resulting books were deemed far more humanizing as a result.

The enticement began with her titles. There was “And Then What Happened, Paul Revere?” (1973); “Why Don’t You Get a Horse, Sam Adams?” (1974); and “Where Was Patrick Henry on the 29th of May?” (1975).

There was “Will You Sign Here, John Hancock?” (1976); “Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George?” (1977); and “Shh! We’re Writing the Constitution” (1987).

Turning the title page, readers were pulled immediately into the story. “Traitor: The Case of Benedict Arnold” (1981), for instance, opens this way:

“When Benedict Arnold was a teenager, some people in his hometown of Norwich, Conn., predicted that he’d grow up to be a success. Others said, no. Benedict Arnold would turn out badly. As it happened, everyone was right.”

Glimmering throughout the narratives were the curious facts that Mrs. Fritz had mined in the course of her research: Paul Revere, on setting out for a certain horseback ride on the 18th of April in ’75, discovered he had forgotten his spurs and dispatched his dog to fetch them. Harriet Beecher Stowe hoped only that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would realize enough money to let her buy the material for a silk dress.

Reviewing Mrs. Fritz’s book “Where Do You Think You’re Going, Christopher Columbus?” in The New York Times Book Review in 1980, the children’s author Georgess McHargue wrote, “Jean Fritz has what amounts to perfect pitch when writing history or biography for young people.”

Jean Guttery was born on Nov. 16, 1915, in Hankow (now Hankou), China, to Arthur Minton Guttery, a Presbyterian missionary, and the former Myrtle Chaney.

Her fascination with the American past, she later said, began with her parents’ stories of their homeland.

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The cover of one of Mrs. Fritz’s books.CreditPutnam Juvenile

“My interest in writing about American history stemmed originally, I think, from a subconscious desire to find roots,” Mrs. Fritz is quoted as saying in the reference work Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults. “I lived in China until I was 13, hearing constant talk about ‘home’ (meaning America), but since I had never been ‘home,’ I felt like a girl without a country.”

Returning to the United States with her family in the late 1920s, Jean was reared in West Hartford, Conn. After graduating from West Hartford High School, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and in 1941 married Michael Fritz.

Mrs. Fritz began writing in the 1950s — first picture books and later historical fiction. But she soon realized that historical nonfiction offered a singular world of narrative possibility.

As she told The Christian Science Monitor in 1988:

“I got so frustrated with having to fix up fictional plots that I was glad to finally get away from all that, and just tell things the way they happened — which often is a lot stranger than anything anyone could make up!”

Mrs. Fritz won particular acclaim for “Homesick: My Own Story” (1982). A collection of linked narratives that straddles the border between fiction and memoir, the volume traces Mrs. Fritz’s life from her girlhood in China to her longed-for yet uneasy passage to America.

“Homesick” won a National Book Award and was named a Newbery Honor Book, as the runners-up for the Newbery Medal, the American Library Association’s annual award for children’s literature, are known.

Her other historical books include “Who’s That Stepping on Plymouth Rock?” (1975), “The Double Life of Pocahontas” (1983) and “George Washington’s Mother” (1992).

Her work, nearly all published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons or its imprints, was illustrated over the years by some of the foremost children’s-book artists of the 20th century, among them Trina Schart Hyman, Margot Tomes and Tomie de Paola.

Mrs. Fritz’s husband died in 1995. Besides her son, her survivors include a daughter, Andrea Pfleger, and two grandchildren. She was previously a longtime resident of Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

Her other laurels include the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, awarded by the library association for a distinguished body of work in children’s literature, and the National Humanities Medal, presented in 2003 by President George W. Bush.

While Mrs. Fritz had long ago learned the value of leavening history with humor, she found, on visiting schools and libraries, that she had to give her readers permission to dispense with the hushed veneration in which historical books had long trafficked.

“I’ll tell kids something funny, and they’ll all look at their teacher, to see if it’s O.K. to laugh,” she said in the Christian Science Monitor interview. “You can almost hear them thinking: ‘This is history. Is it supposed to be funny?’”

Correction:May 26, 2017

An obituary on May 18 about Jean Fritz, the author of historical biographies for children, using information from a relative, referred incorrectly to her family. She had a younger sister who died in infancy; she was not an only child.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: Jean Fritz, 101, a Writer Who Brought Historical Figures to Life for Children. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe